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The Slave System In Stephanie Smallwood's Saltwater Slavery

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The history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade is something more complex than many people are often taught. Built through years of changes and laws, the slave system become an everyday economy through which many, especially Europeans, prospered through the trade of Africans. In her short book Saltwater Slavery, Stephanie Smallwood focuses on the process of commodification and the different aspects and details of the Atlantic slave system. Aspects such as the “social death” of African captives were important when it came to the actual marketing and value that the European traders would put on them. With time, as the slave trade grew, the shipment of Africans across the Atlantic became more frequent. The effect that these trips had on
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